About the 720,renember that they have to make something affordable,don't expect something outstanding,i expect something as powerful as 650ti (or less ) with a lot of blur to make ppl think it's actually awesomely beautiful.

A high end 8970 type chip in the xbox 720 would take console gaming to a entirely new level.

At that point tossing in native keyboard and mouse support could be the final straw on pc gamings back.

and the above comment isnt all that true.

they make their $ On game sales mostly they usually eat a loss on the actual console and when buying in the bulk they will be the cost per part will go down tremendously esp considering amd's position in the market.

At retail. Buying enough of those directly from the manufacturer, with a guarantee that you will sell tens of millions of them tends to change prices of components.

Computer hardware core components volume discount levels are typically very little. Tens of millions by one retailer or even reseller is pretty unrealistic considering the variety of brands and models.

Strictly speaking at retail level, the most I've seen move for a single brand, model at one retailer over life time of the product was about 1,000 pieces and I'm talking about some of the high ends.

Realistically, even with commitment of hundreds of thousands of unit, I just don't see manufacturers dropping their pants and marking down price to extremes.

I would almost go as far as saying, if you can commit to that kind of quantity then they may not even give out discount because: you've created demand far beyond supply, they also know the card is now a 'HOT' product means they don't need to give out discounts to push the products out the door and they don't want one retailer/reseller monopolizing a single model.

Any dx10 or above console is going to be a great benefit to pc gaming. Until now we have only been getting dx9 games with some dx10 and dx11 features (shaders) scabbed on. The biggest difference between dx9 and dx10 is the geometry shader. We have never seen a game yet that is natively developed in dx10+ and makes use of the geometry shader. With a new xbox console, this will start.